Raid mess..

[valaar]

Hi
I have 2 40mb disks that used to be part of a raid 0 array.I used the promice chip(20276)that came with my m/b.
that motherboard was fried and my old motherboard has no
raid controller.
Is there a way to recover the data stored in the disks
by using software raid as described in the article?
I currently have XP/home but i would be happy to upgrade
to pro or even linux if it might work.
Right now when i connect the disks to the ide controller
i get the msg"this disk is not formatted would you like
to format it now?"(NOOOOO!!!)

 

[Crashman]

Sorry to say it, but your best option would be to replace the board with the same board. Anything else is not garunteed to work. The closest thing that might work is replacing the board with anything that has the same promise chip. Just about all your other options are not going to retrieve the data.

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[sjonnie]

You should be able to get away with just buying another Promise card and plugging you array into that.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> 😎

 

[RichPLS]

Good luck, sometimes it will work, sometimes not.
Let us know if you get the array back.

<font color=red><pre>\\//__________________________________
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[valaar]

Thank you for replying,
It looks like you are all right,I upgraded to xp pro today.
I can see them both at the console but i cant create
a stripped array without formating them first so i left it.
There are some strange things happening though,one appears
double in size and the other appears unallocated and empty.
The explorer recognizes them as a single empty disk with
74gb used and 8 free!
Only a new promise card would work i think but i
prefer to avoid that!.I dont want a raid array anymore
(look at what happened 🙁 )
I also remember thinking back then that raid was only
really usefull(1500->2500-2700fps)when editing huge unfragmented files
(like divx or mpeg's).Ripping was
a little faster also reaching 27 mb/sec at the end of
some disks.

 

[valaar]

I also tried a data recovery utility but without any luck.
The author claims it can recover data from broken arrays and that would be ok but:
The searching takes hours(there must be like 80.000 files if i remember correctly),the originall filenames are lost,the directory tree is lost also(all files come up
at a single huge list) and a couple of windows wallpapers i opened were corrupted.

 

[jim552]

With all of this time being spent on "methods" that were unlikely to have worked, and have proven not to haved worked so far, it seems that a few bucks to replace the motherboard or purchase an new promise controller would have been well spent. (Unless this is just an educational exercise rather than an actual attempt to recover important data.)

MOST software that can recover data from RAID arrays, still does require that the array be in a proper state. For RAID 0 this usually entails the SAME controller being present or at the very least a controller that is KNOWN to be compatible. (I ALWAYS go with the same controller.)

Under ALL RAID levels there are trade-offs and pitfalls. They ALL have their use and even necessity at times. You just found a pitfall.

Depending on the software that you had used to attempt to recover the data, and what options had been selected in that software, it is possible at this point that there is no longer a valid method of recovering the data at all from the existing drives.

Sorry about your loss, but remember "all things will break, and all things can fail". Taking reasonable and appropriate methods to guard against either of these situations will avoid a lot of head aches.